Candy is Dandy but Liquor is Quicker

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
-- Ogden Nash

« A small gallery of photos of Helsinki teenagers having fun at Penkkarit 2006. »

I love penkkarit [read No more Latin, No more French... if you are unfamiliar with the tradition] as it's hard not to enjoy trucks filled with drunk, happy teenagers tossing candy into the streets of Helsinki. At my Catholic high school, the nuns let us have a full day of mass for such sorts of events. They sure knew how to have fun. It's no wonder my entertainment threshold is so low. I'm sure the just the thought of penkkarit would have given them all the vapours.

Last year I swore that, since I had the flu, next year I would go down to the Merisatama on the southern edge of town to take pictures [ see map of penkkarit routes (~400k)from the HS. These don't change much from year to year, if at all]. This year I had a blistering migrane due to my tooth problem, but I forced myself to go as it was an unusually beautiful sunny day and penkkarit always makes me smile.

The HS had an interesting article about the history and folklore of Penkkarit (~60k pdf, suomeksi). Helena Saarikoski is apparently the folklorist in residence on Penkkarit and has published a study, Kouluajan kivoin päivä. Folkloristinen tutkimus penkinpainajaisperinteestä. English Summary: The Best School Day. A Folkloristic Study on the Tradition of “Penkinpainajaiset”. 240p. Helsinki: SKS (Finnish Literature Society) 1994, on the folklore and traditions over the years that looks very interesting.

I know the kids look forward to it, but it's funny how one of the dog owners in the park commented how taking the young kids down to the park to get the candy is a cherished pastime and, given the number of kids barely old enough to walk who were going for the shiny bits in the snow, I can understand why. Spring is on its way.

permalink Ω 23 February 2006, Helsinki

The Dark and The Dead

« Even in darkness, there is light. A few photos from Pyhäinmiesten Päivä in Hietaniemi Cemetery. »

In spite of the pissing rain on saturday, I dragged my camera and my poor umbrella-toting assistant cum husband out to Hietaniemi Cemetery to wander amidst the candlelit graves illuminated for the Finnish All Hallow's, Pyhäinmiesten Päivä. I have always found the abundance of candles, each representing a member of the living hauling themselves out to the cemetery in usually disagreeable weather to remember their dead who have returned to the dust from whence they came, a touching and beautiful sight. The cemetery was mostly quiet by the time we arrived save for the hissing and sizzling of rain as it landed on the hot metal tops of the candles. I had hoped to take more, and more interesting, photos but the steady rain made it a challenge to use the tripod which was slippery so I only took a couple of shots with it. I also didn't want to change rolls of film with no dry place around, either. So, I figure it at least got us both out of the house and I will think to bring a towel and ziplock baggies in the rain next time.

November begins with the dead as All Hallow's is the first saturday and continues with ever increasing darkness as the year slides towards the Winter Solstice. Even the name itself, Marraskuu, means dead month, though it is likely more in the sense of harvest than Halloween. Pyhäinmiesten Päivä (holy men day) is a wee bit of a misnomer since in the cemetery it is not the saints the candles pay tribute to, but to all the dead, a.k.a. All Soul's Day which was abolished in many protestant churches in the Reformation. In the dark northern latitudes, it is rather plain to see that the christian church co-opted the tradition of Samhain, repackaged it in a different mythology and resold it to the locals, but it retains much of its pagan flavour since, at least traditionally, the day involves not only lighting the darkness but offerings of a harvest meal and sauna. Vuotuinen Ajantieto also mentions a few bits of lore such as if the sun shines at all between All Hallow's and Christmas, then there will be a beautiful summer. While I doubt there is any truth in that, it's good to have something to look forward to in this, the most dark and difficult month in the Finnish year.

permalink Ω 8 November 2005, Helsinki

Fart Thursday

« Creamy Green Pea Soup. »

The cliché of all clichés of Finnish food, akin to apple pie in the US, is pea soup. You read and hear about pea soup Thursday with great regularity from random tourists, visitors and journalists alike. Now, to be honest, I've never really cared much for pea soup given that it usually came from a Campbell's soup can and shared much texture and flavour characteristics with those of white school paste. I gave up my wanton paste eating ways years ago so I had no burning desire to give much attention to pea soup, even in Finland.

But, Gourmet magazine in Finland had an interesting article about pea soup in their regular Kitchen Classics feature that often spotlights the history of foods long since forgotten. I clipped it out and thought maybe I'd get around to trying it out since there's nothing like a hot bowl of soup when it's cold and dreary outside. The article reveals that, like so many other culinary traditions here and elsewhere, the tradition has religious roots.

Home Kitchen Classics - Pea Soup / Hernekeitto

by Inga Aaltonen

Pea soup has been firmly at the center of Finnish food culture that seemingly potato, pizza and pasta have been unable to replace over the centuries. In office cafeterias, pea soup has been established as a Thursday menu fixture, though there have been attempts to unseat this ubiquity. Even the Helsinki University teachers complained when the dining room attempted to take away Thursday pea soup.

"The warmest army memories of many are about the steaming hot dish arriving in the foxhole. Peasoup never tasted better", writes the Ruotuväki (Finnish army) magazine.

"In the field kitchens, peasoup simmers for many hours and the steaming soup tastes especially good for the company out in the woods. For vegetarians the peasoup is made without meat", says the Army superintendent in charge of food, Liisa Gröhndahl.

A Tradition of Fasting

The tradition of pea soup as the Thursday meal gained in popularity already in the 1400s. Then the effect of Catholic church was strong in Sweden, especially in Western Gothenland, where there were many monasteries. According to the church rules Friday was for fasting. In the day preceding the fast it became customary to eat as heartily as possible. Pea soup gave strength and kept the hunger away for a long time. The peas were held to be better raw material (for soup) than the ingredients of the common daily meal, swede and cabbage. Moreover, pea soup was handy to make back when food was most often prepared in one cauldron. Pea soup was fortified with a slice of lard.

Pea soup is strange in that it has been been enjoyed in Finland for centuries now also during the weekend and holidays. Pea soup has been offered as a valued feast food both in weddings and at funerals. The importance of pea soup as a feast food can be seen in that the task of making the soup was given to a special pea soup cook. In Finland the pea soup has been thickened with rye flour, oats, sometimes a little bit of swede has been added. Meat is added, usually pork, but also mutton or beef.

Traditionally also a pork foot has been put to boil in the soup. The salted feet have been first soaked over night in water, then smoked or dried, baked lightly in low heat, and then added to the soup.

In my home, father was always given a pig foot for laskiainen (Shrovetide), half of which he enjoyed with some self-made mustard and beetroot-in-vinegar. Us kids were not very interested in eating and sucking the pig feet. We just ate quietly hoping that eating the laskiais pea soup without making a sound would help to keep the mosquitoes away during the summer.

Tastes from Around the World

Konrad Hagger, who was born in 1666 in Württemberg, rose from a sculley cook to the cook in the court of the archbishop of Salzburg, Johann Ernst Graf Thun. There Hagger wrote an extensive cookbook based on what he had learned over the years, and the book was published in 1719. Konrad Hagger's Saltzburgishes Kochbuch is a beautifully illustrated cookbook with over 2500 recipes. Most of the recipes are fish and other fasting time recipes and tips.

There is also a pea soup recipe which is served in wintertime with smoked tongue. The soup can be made, in addition to peas, also from barley, lentils, or beans. The barley, peas, lentils, and the like are soaked, and prepared in the best possible way, and then either pureed or left whole. In any case, the soaked tongue is sliced very thinly, cubed, and then either added to the soup or served directly on the plates. If the soup is pureed, one can also enjoy toasted bread cubes. The serving ideas of Konrad Hagger are sensible even today!

The Swedish pea soup is made of yellow peas. In northern Sweden the soup is traditionally spiced with marjoram, and in southern Sweden with thyme. Later it became common to serve warm punch and, as dessert, pancakes or crepes with jam along with the soup.

I never quite understood the whole fasting your way to holiness thing. I'll confess now that I used to eat meat on Fridays during lent and, well, any other day I wasn't supposed to. So, pea soup Thursday is a mini-version of Lent's Fat Tuesday which, after having made and eaten a bit of this soup, could easily be renamed to Fart Thursday. If methane will take you closer to heaven, this stuff will rocket you right on past Pluto. It could be a viable biofuel option in years to come.

Gourmet offered a recipe for pea soup that I started with but altered slightly since boiling stuff together generally doesn't make for a lot of flavour and, aside from not usually being able to find a pork knuckle at the local grocer, a good stock from bones tends to take a lot of time and patience, both of which I don't often have in large quantities. Sautéing the onions, spices and meat before adding the stock and the peas gives the soup a much richer flavour. The rye croutons along with the sour cream with mustard really, really make for a delicious bowl of soup with a pleasant texture. Beano served beforehand is also recommended. :)

Chunky Pea Soup

Makes: about 6-8 servings of hearty soup
Time: about 10 minutes prep, but 3 hours cooking time
Source: Gourmet (FIN)

• 6 dl (500g) or 1 lb dried peas
• 2-2,5 L or 8.5-10.5 cups water
• 600-800g or about 1.5 lb pork knuckle or lean pork, cubed
• (chicken bouillon)
• 1 or 2 onions or leeks, chopped
• 2-3 medium carrots, chopped
• (a bit of minced garlic and/or ginger)
• 1-2 tablespoons butter
• salt
• majoram or thyme

toppings

• sour cream or kermaviili
• mustard
• rye bread croutons

1. Rinse peas. Soak in cold water for 12-24 hours.
2. Chop onions/leeks and sautee with butter and seasonings until soft. If using lean pork meat rather than the knuckle, chop and quickly cook it with the onions and sesonings. Boil water and prepare chicken stock from bouillon and add to the onions and meat.
3. Pour the peas along with the soaking water into the soup pot with the meat and onions and bring to a boil. Simmer for 2-3 hours. Remove the pork knuckle if using and remove the meat, chop it up and put it into the soup.
4. Serve with a dallop of sour cream mixed with mustard and fresh rye bread croutons. (slice bread into squares, toss in a bowl with a little olive oil or butter, toast in the oven until brown.)
5. Open the windows.

After being happy with the chunky pea soup I noticed that creamy pea soup was also rather common in a lot of the local cookbooks. I was curious about the texture so I chose a recipe from CI that called for sautéing shallots or leeks and included iceberg lettuce for a bit of frothy lift which I thought was a nice touch.

One thing I do get annoyed with on many occasions are recipes that ask for a food processor since, as far as I'm concerned, all a food processor does is make more work for you as they are hard to clean, they're a pain in the ass to use and they consume a lot of precious counter space. I swear by the little hand blender I bought a few years back that does 99% of all tasks that a home cook could want from a food processor. The hand blender puréed the soup in the pot without a problem. The original recipe also directs the cook to put the purée through a strainer but the soup was so smooth I can't imagine why anyone would want to do this since, after straining, the result is a very thin, green liquid.

As with the chunky style pea soup, the addition of croutons, sour cream with mustard and a bit of reduced balsamic vinegar really make this soup. Of the two soups, I can't really decide which I liked more, but both were a massive improvement over the paste-like canned soups and cafeteria soups that generally have little, if any, flavour.

Creamy Green Pea Soup

Makes: about 6 1/2 cups, serving 4 to 6
Time: about 30 minutes
Source: CI

• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter 
• 8 medium shallots (about 140g), minced, or 1 medium leek, white and light green parts chopped fine (about 1 1/3 cups or 3 1/4 dl)
• 2 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour 
• 3 1/2 cups or 8,25dl chicken broth 
• 1 1/2 pounds or 700g frozen peas, partially thawed at room temperature for 10 minutes
• 12 leaves Boston/iceberg lettuce (about 3 ounces/85g) from 1 small head, leaves washed and dried
• 1/2 cup or 1,25 dl heavy cream 
• Table salt and ground black pepper 

 

toppings

• sour cream or kermaviili
• mustard
• rye bread croutons
• reduced balsamic vinegar

1. Heat butter in large saucepan over low heat until foaming; add shallots or leeks and cook, covered, until softened, 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add flour and cook, stirring constantly, until thoroughly combined, about 30 seconds. Stirring constantly, gradually add chicken broth. Increase heat to high and bring to boil; reduce heat to medium-low and simmer 3 to 5 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, in food processor, process partially thawed peas until coarsely chopped. Or, if you don't have a food processor, use a hammer on the bags of peas to break them up a bit or the chopper attachment for a hand blender. Add peas and lettuce to simmering broth. Increase heat to medium-high, cover and return to simmer; simmer 3 minutes. Uncover, reduce heat to medium-low, and continue to simmer 2 minutes longer.
3. Puree soup with a hand blender or in a standing blender. When smooth, stir in cream. Heat mixture over low heat until hot, about 3 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper; top with sour cream mustard, balsamic vinegar, and croutons. Serve immediately.

permalink Ω 30 September 2005, Helsinki

Family Pictures

« The last ride on the Linnanmäki ferris wheel. They are removing it this winter and replacing it with a newer, bigger model. I took pictures to help keep me from looking down. :) »

While chatting over dinner with a friend, we bumped into the somewhat odd absence of family photos (computer desktop backgrounds don't count) in cubes and offices in Finland. In the US it's reasonably common to see pictures of husbands, wives, kids and family pets proudly displayed in the workplace landscape but, after thinking about it for a while, I can't recall seeing any such photos in my workplace in Finland. The lack of photos is strange in the sense that Finns do seem to cherish their home and family life far more consistently than I remember Americans doing. Perhaps Americans spend more time in the office and need to be reminded what their family looks like or why they spend more time at work than at home? Is it that home is considered a far more private topic in Finland? It's a curious difference.

permalink Ω 28 September 2005, Helsinki

Victim of Love

« This poor lycra-clad bastard is about to get married but only after he dresses up and sells sexy photos of his lycra-clad self to giggling onlookers having a beer. He is a polttarit victim. »

I'm not really sure why every time that I mention to people that Jarkko and I had the best wedding ever when we eloped to Las Vegas they either giggle or have a look of disbelief as though only drunk celebs, drunk white trash or drunk white trash celebs got married in Las Vegas. I have three older sisters and two of them had frightfully expensive weddings which included the usual mind-numbing details such as dresses, catering, etc. and, by the time the wedding day came, they were too tired and stressed to really enjoy it. Some do the big wedding out of vanity, some do it out of tradition, but I've never quite understood the value of spending $60k or more on one event whose main purpose is to impress the mother-in-law, immediate family and those attending.

Eloping to Vegas was fun. I remain rather disappointed that Jarkko drew the line at my vision of going to the drive-thru chapel service in a classic convertible with Tom Jones in the back singing Sex Bomb, but saving the whole circus that is the modern wedding was worth eloping to the blinking neon oasis for under $1000. We drove through the southwest for a week afterwards for our honeymoon of sorts before heading to a conference we attended every year. I don't think I've entirely forgiven him for commenting that 'If you've seen one sandstone formation you've seen them all.' somewhere in the middle of Arizona as I had already seen the southwest but thought that it might be fun to show him around and considered leaving him on the side of the highway enroute to the nearest spa hotel. Somehow, he managed to remain inside the vehicle and live. We even recently celebrated our fourth anniversary. :)

A bonus of elopement is no bridal shower and no stag or hen parties or, as they're called in Finland, polttarit. It seems to be a very popular form of torture for Finnish guys to dress up the groom-to-be in something really rather unflattering and parade them around downtown for maximum humiliation while trying to unload something onto people with enough pity to buy up what they have and get them off the hook for the evening. One guy a while back tried to sell me a rather unimpressive selection of porn tapes while wearing a sombrero and a cape. It was pretty hilarious but I still think it's an odd form of cruelty to make a guy do this to prove he's willing to walk down the aisle. I suppose, too, it's just a good excuse to get drunk, wear lycra or women's underwear, amuse the adults and scare small children, but friends should not let friends sell photos of themselves wearing a lycra leotard in a cool breeze for pocket change to random beer drinking strangers on terraces as someday, when the guy runs for political office, the picture will resurface and it will appear in the paper with the word "shrinkage?" underneath.

Las Vegas is a lot more fun where the only ones wearing lycra are the Elvis impersonators. Elope before it's too late! :)

permalink Ω 29 July 2005, Helsinki

Goin' to Moominworld

« The head and cats of Tarja Halonen sit in front of Kiasma while Mannerheim looks on from his horse. »

In an attempt to go on holiday without actually leaving the country I am, in fact, going to Moominworld for a few days. "Oh, my kids are too old for that place now", said one of my colleagues. When asked how old they are he said that they are aged 5 and 7. Perfect. I should fit right in with the toddlers. They better have a killer gift shop. :)

permalink Ω 25 July 2005, Helsinki

June Pole

« A small gallery from raising the Juhannussalko (Midsummer Pole) on Midsummer Eve. »

I went to watch the raising of the Midsummer pole this year since I was curious, hadn't ever seen a 'June pole' and it seemed like a harmless excuse to wander downtown for a few hours. It was, as expected, a rather low-key event where a few men in traditional costumes brought the Midsummer pole, raised it and then danced a bit with similarly clad women (the Katrilli folk dancers) with little fanfare. There was no sex or debauchery which might have made for a bit more lively event, but one must conserve such excesses for Juhannus. One very annoying feature was that, in spite of the crowd and the obvious event happening in the center of the Esplanade, people just kept walking along as though walking on a stage in mid-performance were perfectly normal. I'm not sure why these rude rubbernecking interlopers couldn't just walk around, instead of through, the event but it made me wish desperately for a taser. Maybe the organisers need to put up barriers with a notice in a few different languages that thru traffic should go around the performance instead.

The tradition of the "June" pole is rather hard to be specific about since it has a lot of regional variation. The Midsummer pole definitely arrived in Finland from Sweden and, as far as I can tell, is a feature of Juhannus only in the Swedish-speaking areas. Finnish poles appear to be a bit less ornate than their Swedish counterparts as well (a nice watercolour diagram illustrates the elements of the Swedish Midsummer pole).

Perhaps the best known Midsummer tradition is the decorating and raising of the Midsummer pole (maypole). It's origins have divided scientists. One side sees the pole as a remnant from heathen fertility rites and that it can be traced back to prehistoric times and sacrifice feasts. The other opinion is that the Midsummer pole came to the north with Hansa merchants in the Middle Ages and that it is related to the maypoles of the Continent.

The oldest reference to Midsummer poles on Åland is on a early 19th century village map from Hammarland. The oldest depictions of poles are by the Swede Nils Månsson Mandelgren, who was on an expedition to Åland in 1871 to examine the local history of art.

Details of the Midsummer Pole

To make a Midsummer pole a high and straight spar is felled, preferrably in winter and not during sap time. Crossbars are attached, usually three to five if single or two or three if crossed. In the beginning the Midsummer poles were green, covered completely with flowers and leaves. Eventually the Midsummer poles were painted white and garlands wrapped on the spars and crossbars. Sometimes a spiral is painted on the spar instead of hanging leaf garland.

The decorations vary from village to village and from year to year. They have been interpreted in many ways, and the author Valdemar Nyman complained about the interpretations too often being about industry or the weather. The decorations could also be the result of the availability of material or of friendly competition between villages. The pole has also been associated with shipping, as it was common to decorate the masts with leaves. A Midsummer pole can be seen as a ship's mast rised on land.

At the top of the Midsummer poles there is usually a small wooden man, the "fäktargubbe". He wears headgear and is dressed in a white shirt, a tie and a waistcoat or some kind of uniform. He spins and waves his arms in the wind symbolizing diligence and work resulting in a good crop. In some districts a truck replaces the "fäktargubbe".

A streamer is attached below the wooden man. It has had different designs during the course of time. The colours have varied and sometimes the year or some other text has been painted on it. Since Åland got it's own flag in 1954 most streamers have had the colours - blue, yellow and red. In the archipelago it has been common to hoist beautiful cloth and flags of different countries on the spar. On Kökar the girls never wore their best scarves as the boys would take them and hoist their scarves up the pole.

Small boats are placed on shorter crossbars and attached so that they rotate in the wind if properly rigged and if the Midsummer pole stands perpendicularly. The boats vary from detailed miniatures to pieces of wood with a metal sail. They are said to symbolize Åland shipping.

String decorated with leaves is hung between the crossbars. Usually aspen leaves are tied to cotton string, but in some districts leaves from other trees, lily of the valley leaves and flowers from the Swedish whitebeam are used as well. The garlands are made on Midsummer's Eve, either earlier in the day or just before the Midsummer pole is rised. They are hung to form a pattern of an hourglass or of squares, depending on the amount of crossbars.

The Midsummer pole is taken down well in advance before Midsummer's Eve and fixed up. Old crowns are taken down and the leaves from the previous year are cut off. The Midsummer pole captain is in charge of the work and makes sure everything is ready before the Midsummer pole is raised. He is legally responsible in the event of an accident.

permalink Ω 17 July 2005, Helsinki

Nepp It

« Playing neppis in the sand next to the sea and a few other photos of our neppis afternoon a few weeks ago. »

One of the guys at work suggested playing neppis a few weeks ago and pointed to the neppis web site to explain to the uninitiated. After reading through the pages I was more confused than when I began. I thought that if I was reading correctly, neppis was a pastime for the mid-30's set of Finnish guys who never quite got over their Hot Wheels as a kid and thus continued to play with them while making it a somewhat official sport in an attempt to make it respectable. I found that I was mostly correct.

Neppis is played in the sand next to the water with regulation toy cars that are pushed around the track by flicking them with a finger. There are hazards on the course to make it more challenging and, of course, beer to make it more amusing. I thought it was a fun, quirky sort of Finnish pastime of a certain part of the 'tweener' generation [tail end of the boomers but not quite gen x]. The serious players will be at Hietsu on Saturday at 14.00 which I'm not sure will be more or less entertaining than playing with my semi-inebriated colleagues. :)

permalink Ω 13 July 2005, Helsinki

Through Finland in Packets

« Crime scene jesus. »

Ever since the Washington Post started doing their 'Finland Journal' blog I've been thinking about saying something, but wanted to wait until they had finished the series and until I had enough time to think about what I wanted to say without sounding like one of the many wackjobs, both Finnish and American, whose comments ranged from explaining how to pronounce SOW-na to ranting about the Swedish Fascist oppression in Finland to bickering about nothing. Mostly I just found the commentary deeply depressing as monoculture was praised as the reason for all the good things in Finland and the reason for all the bad things in the US a bit more often than I found comfortable. I come from one of the most fucked up nations on the planet, but I'm awfully glad for the variety of people there since it is the greatest asset the US has in terms of creativity and innovation. Being a threat to this vaunted Finnish monoculture is not a fun place to be at times. Some expats just complain, some never do and the rest of us try to get on with life as best as we can and occasionally, cautiously, commiserate over beer and try to focus on the positive things as much as possible. One of the reasons I like my 'cookery' is that it's fun to explore the differences in cuisine, I'm reasonably good at it, it's something positive, and nobody hates the person who brings tasty treats for afternoon coffee. :)

There has been a lot of criticism among the foreigners, and even a Phinn, here about the series since visiting somewhere as a journalist on an official junket likely sponsored by the state vs. living here are two very different experiences and given the inevitable superficiality of the WP coverage, a lot of us were disappointed. One of the reasons that Finland is supposedly the "country that Americans know least about" is that aside from the usual Santa, sauna and sisu stories, very little else gets written in English about this country. I've taken to collecting books on travel to Finland, some more than 100 years old, and I could match the topics nearly 1:1 with the old travelogues to the Finland Journal coverage. In fact, I think I liked the bitchy and less fawning Mrs. Tweedie's Through Finland in Carts from 1898 much better as, in spite of her unsavoury British imperialism, she was a far more snarky and entertaining writer. But, again, same shit, different century. Surely, even the Finns must bore of this though the clichés are what keep the tourists coming. It's like the hackneyed 'pahk ya cah in Havahd Yahd' and Paul Revere legends of Boston. The Boston strangler, townies and Southie don't get a lot of press since they aren't exactly attractive to locals much less to tourists.

For the expats, there's precisely dick to prepare them for what awaits them making a life here. Trying to explain how Finland differs for residents as opposed to tourists to the newly arrived is a chore since you either sound bitter or are constantly doubting your own experience of everything in a miasma of cultural relativism and personal baggage. A lot of us come to live here because we have a spouse/SO, a spouse/SO who very likely does not have an objective view or an understanding of the difference between being Finnish and being not Finnish in Finland. I was in quite a sulk for a few weeks after I met an Aus-Fin couple who had moved here and, after two months, the Australian was escaping in defeat after being told repeatedly in interviews that her education credentials were worthless in Finland, the downside of an educational system regarded, and which regards itself, so highly. Her boyfriend seemed completely surprised by this and felt badly for not being a better judge of his own country. With the dearth of realistic information for those wanting to move here, many have no other choice than to trust their Finnish loved one which may or may not prove to be the best option. This seems to happen more often than not as expats don't often stay for more than a few years before giving up and heading back home, with or without the spouse/SO. I don't know if immigration actually keeps track of those who leave and why, but it would be interesting to see the average length of stay for expats as I expect it is generally very short. How many of the foreigners work for Nokia would also be an interesting statistic.

The question this raises is why do people leave? Finland is, in many ways, a lovely country, but why do expats frequently only stay for a short while? It's an important question, one few seem curious about or willing to discuss. The most frequent rebuttals to any criticism or merely mentioning that life here can be a challenge is that it's "the same everywhere" or that we can always just pack up and go home. Ironically, I would expect this sort of chiding from red state Americans. I think that this might be at the heart of much of our nebulous reasons for struggle here; that Finland is a young country, even by American standards, and with a long history of fighting off invading outsiders, Finland has developed a very, very strong streak of nationalism. What's wrong with nationalism? Well, after 9/11, I saw neighbours wanting to beat the shit out of the grocers down the street who had been there for over 20 years because suddenly they were those dark towel heads, "them", who flew into the WTC instead of the two brothers who had been selling them their groceries for decades. Nationalism separates as much as it binds and mostly it just makes people blind and monumentally stupid.

One of the first memorable experiences was while walking HB down Bulevardi about a week after arriving here and running into a smiling little old lady who wanted to pet him and started chatting me up. As soon as I started to say something the smile fell off her face which was replaced by a scowl full of scorn whereupon she screeched something, waved me off and stalked away in a huff. I was like, what the fuck just happened? This would be repeated quite a few times and, in spite of being able to rationalise the behaviour, first impressions tend to be difficult to change. I remain rather shy about being busted as a foreigner and still have a very difficult time daring to say anything to strangers. In the dog park, I'll stand around understanding everything the other dog owners are saying but don't join the conversation which has, on occasion, marked me as a foreigner just as much as saying something would have. :)

Generally, it's the small things, the day to day things, the very difficult to define things, that make life as an outsider here a daily struggle. Learning the language is the single largest hurdle in bridging the gap and becoming less of an alien, but after two years I'm still cautious, still shy, still neurotic about speaking it to the point of avoiding situations where I might have to say something to someone because I'm scared of being busted as an outsider. We all have little defensive tactics like this, depending on our individual hang-ups and struggles. One of my friends visited home a while back and she remarked in an email that she was in awe of how suddenly aware she was of how the little daily things in Finland make life so much more work than back in the realm of the friendly familiarity of home.

Some things, however, aren't so vague, but these are the things we don't talk about or quietly discuss amongst ourselves because they're either too depressing to dwell upon or tend to be met with vituperative attacks. There are things endemic to being an expat, a foreigner in a strange land, that often make you wonder if it's you, if you're not trying hard enough or if it's the culture that is responsible for the discontent and many things often do have simple explanations, if not simple solutions. I have lived elsewhere and, given the culture and the language barrier, Finland is a very challenging place to find a happy niche whether or not any Finns want to hear or acknowledge that. It's not a destination for the easily discouraged or the impatient.

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to a couple with two adorable basset hounds who had just returned to Finland after 7 years abroad who remarked at how "international" Helsinki seemed nowadays. There are many words I'd use to describe Helsinki, most of them nice even, but international wouldn't be one of them. Being part of the EU while rejecting or reluctantly accepting some of the things that come with being part of the EU, like foreigners, doesn't make a place international any more than dining out at a Nepalese restaurant makes you a world traveller. This doesn't mean Finland should aspire to the problems of the Netherlands, but acknowledging the problems that exist here for foreigners might be something to consider since people do generally tend to stay in places that they feel welcome in and Finland, either intentionally or not, often gives outsiders the impression that we are either not welcome or just merely tolerated. If Finland doesn't want foreigners, it should really just pull out of the EU and close the borders.

So, I suppose the point of my rambling is that there are at least a few of us around who like it here and are trying with sincerity to learn the language, fit in and get along like everyone else but there are so many conflicting messages between what we read in the paper or hear from our spouses and what we actually experience at times that it makes it difficult to reconcile the disparity and still keep on trying. It's a struggle. It's like bloody musical chairs watching all the expats leave one by one.

permalink Ω 15 June 2005, Helsinki

We call this work

« Art or tactical baby launching device built atop an old pram? »

I'm still recovering from a 'Summer Seminar', a.k.a. work sponsored party, at Vanajanlinna on Tuesday and Wednesday. I used to be the drunken lush in the US when I'd stagger home on a couple of beers at 1am or so, but in Finland I'm just a rank amateur when everyone else stays up until 7 or so drinking well past the early hour I retreated in defeat. :)

permalink Ω 9 June 2005, Helsinki

Bollocks

« How the Finns envision Dallas presented in a Stockmann display window. »

So, what is the deal with the apparent Finnish obsession with Texas? American TV and film present only certain small parts of the landscape and so it tends to focus the stereotypes on New York, Texas/Dallas and California with a few other locales thrown in for variety. And all of these shows get exported for reruns to the far corners of the globe so that foreigners everywhere can watch them and build their (mostly false) impressions of the US. Fortunately, I didn't have any such exposure to Finland before moving here so I didn't have any unlearning to do once I arrived, but I do watch with fascination how the everpresent American pop culture tends to form really odd ideas about the US and the people who live there. I'm a Yankee, so I get the urge to run whenever I see a 10-gallon hat and continue to think that not allowing Texas to secede from the Union in 1845 was a big mistake. Granted, Texas does have certain very easily recognizable traits that, say, West Virginia with its barefoot mountain men doesn't. Still, the US is an enormous place and the entire middle of the country gets short shrift when it comes to the media. I think the last time the Midwest was featured in a major movie was Capote's In Cold Blood and, well, that was a gruesome true story. America is so different from state to state that it remains a fascination to me that it hasn't split into a few separate countries. I've given up on the hope that pop culture will reflect a more accurate picture of the US and so when I see the image of the US consistently represented as Texas in Finland, I feel violated in some way as I don't belong here and I don't even belong to the stereotype of the place where I technically do belong. I suspect that Finns in the US would feel similarly if Macy's in NYC always portrayed Finland in the windows as drunken hockey fans pissing on buildings and lying in pools of their own vomit or reindeer herders fawning over Santa Claus.

I took Otava to work yesterday afternoon for a few hours and, while he was quite the charming puppy, I don't think he's a suitable office dog just yet. I'm hoping that by taking him to work, he'll know where I'm going in the morning and not whine when I leave anymore since he seemed to be rather bored with the experience. :) We walked most of the way home through some rather lovely scenic forest which wore him out. When we got to the house we both froze as there was a guy drunk and pissing on the door. It was just before 7p and I thought that it was a bit early for such an encounter until I realised that there were keys in the door and it was one of our neighbours. So, here was a neighbour with his wiener hanging out, pissing a leviathan pool on our front steps, who was so drunk he couldn't speak which gave me thoughts of calling a medic as he must have been drinking for days, not merely a few hours. I was at a loss for words as what do you say to such a person? Even Otava stood unusually still. After about a minute of slack-jawed amazement, I grabbed Otava and ran around to the back door before the guy collapsed into his own pool of urine. I ruminated about this for the rest of the evening wondering why I had been so shocked when I generally see this sort of thing everyday and have become inured to it. I suppose it's just a little discomfiting when it's a neighbour who couldn't hold it in for a few more minutes until he got home to pee in the toilet and so just whipped it out on the front door. There is something so essentially gross and dysfunctional in it's being commonplace. This is supposedly the nice part of town, too. I'd hate to think what drunks do on the bad side of town.

Someone needs to give slacker Alan Burlison a job as he has synergized the Solaris version of /dev/bollocks that he wrote way back when and taken it to the next level by releasing a mobile bollocks version of it for the young and mobile. I used to use /dev/bollocks to generate the tag line for my blog for the first few months. :) One can enjoy it vicariously via a java emulator version [hint: press menu->default phrases if it doesn't work straight off and then menu->next to keep going]. "Coordinate 24/7 infoeconomies." I think Alan needs to go see the movie In Good Company as I think the screen writer had access to /dev/bollocks, too. :)

It snowed every day of this past long week. Snow in late April is a never failing source of amusement since new expats always freak out at the prospect thinking that it surely must be a fluke as, how could it possibly be true that Finland has 9 months of Winter and 3 months of Not Winter which rarely approach temperatures that many of us would consider Summer? We all seem to fall victim to a sort of optimistic delusion that the weather can't possibly be that cold when moving here, that Finns wearing t-shirts in 10C weather exclaiming that it's bloody warm is merely them fucking with us for a laugh. Welcome to Finland. Keep your coat on. :)

permalink Ω 23 April 2005, Helsinki

Sick Day

« The Easter tree from Riihimäki, the Easter City of Finland, in the Fredrikintori with the Ruusutalo[?] behind it. »

I still haven't quite gotten used to sick days in Finland since, you know, you can stay home when you feel like shit and you don't have to worry if you have to take personal time to do it since there is no set allotment of days per year that you can take. I stayed at home and slept all day yesterday and I probably should have stayed home today, too, but it's hard to change such deeply ingrained habits like going to work when you're not feeling poorly enough to be hospitalized. Short of having ebola or barfing up a lung, it's just another workday.

I remember having a job where the HR drone explained to me in the first few days that I was the lucky recipient of one week of paid holiday time that could be taken after I had completed a full year of employment as well as 3 whole sick days that I could use after my 6-month probationary period. She said this very cheerfully as though I must be excited at the prospect of a whole week away from work after putting in a year of countless hours of unpaid overtime. I tried very hard not to roll my eyes and mention that I had 6 weeks of holiday time every year at my previous job. Of course, that should have been my first big clue that leaving the lower paying womb of academia was a bad idea. That was the stingy end of the spectrum but on the whole it wasn't terribly uncommon and still isn't. This is why most people in the US drag their ass to work when sick so that they can infect their coworkers and save their sad allotment of sick days as 'mental health days' to augment their holiday time instead.

permalink Ω 14 April 2005, Helsinki

Purple and Green

« Finns enjoying a walk out on the grasshopper-free ice in -20C weather thanks to St. Urho. »

Today is St. Patrick's Day but yesterday, yesterday was St. Urho's Day, both of which are goofy folklore that have metamorphosed into back-to-back drinking holidays. The only Urho people think of in Finland is the former president, Urho Kekkonen, not the guy who apparently drove the grasshoppers out of Finland in mid-winter and saved the grape harvest. I asked a bunch of people about St. Urho and every one said, "Kekkonen?". There's a statue of Urho in Minnesota where the dedication plate reads:

THE LEGEND OF ST. URHO

One of the lesser known, but extraordinary legends of ages past is the legend of St. Urho-Patron Saint of the Finnish vinyard workers.

Before the last glacial period wild grapes grew with abundance in the area now known as Finland. Archeologists have uncovered evidence of this scratched on the thigh bones of the gieant bears that once roamed northern Europe. The wild grapes were threatened by a plague of grasshoppers until St. Urho banished the lot of them with a few selected Finnish words.

In memory of this impressive demonstration of the Finnish language, Finnish people celebrate on March 16, the day before St. Patrick's day. It tends to serve as a reminder that St. Pat's day is just around the corner and is thus celebrated by squares at sunrise on March 16. Finnish women and children dressed in royal purple and nile green gather around the shores of the many lakes in Finland and chant what St. Urho chanted many years ago.

"HEINASIRKKA, HEINASIRKKA, MENETAALTA HIITEEN."
(Translated: "GRASSHOPPER, GRASSHOPPER, GO AWAY!")

Adult male, (people, not grasshoppers) dressed in green costumes gather on the hills overlooking the lakes, listen to the chant and then kicking out like grasshoppers, they slowly disappear to change costumes from green to purple. The celebration ends with singing and dancing polkas and schottisches and drinking grape juice, though these activities may occur in varying sequences. Color for the day is royal purple and nile green.

SULO HAVUMAKI

The only thing that's green and purple around this time of year is the vomit on the sidewalks. Honest. I found a paper online Ethnic Symbols: Their Role in Maintaining and Constructing Finnish American where the Finnish author tries in earnest to figure out what the American Finns are on about but fails.

Lastly, I will point out that the item St. Urho was ranked as the most controversial item on this list. St. Urho is the fictional Saint of the Finnish Americans who supposedly stopped an invasion of grasshoppers. It seems that there is great debate as to whether St. Urho should be considered a true symbol of Finnishness.

Finnishness? The only Urho these people think of is Kekkonen and he has a fountain. Not to mention where are the vinyards in Finland? In March? This has Hallmark Drinking Holiday written all over it. It is Finnish only in the 'hey, it's cold out, let's go drinking' aspect. :)

Another Finn in the US critques the whole St. Urho's thing which is pretty funny. There are also St. Urho's kitsch for those who really embrace the holiday. I nearly wet my pants reading the Ode to St. Urho which sounds like some Irish brogue gone wrong more than Finnglish. Arrrr, where are me lucky charms....

Ooksi kooksi coolama vee
Santia Urho is ta poy for me!
He sase out ta hoppers as pig as pirds.
Neffer peefor haff I hurd tose words!

He reely tolt tose pugs of kreen
Braffest Finn I effer seen
Some celebrate for St. Pat unt hiss nakes

He kot tall and trong from feelia sour
Unt ate kala moyakka effery hour.
Tat's why tat kuy could sase toes peetles
What krew as thick as chack bine neetles.

So let's give a cheer in hower pest vay
On Sixteenth of March, St. Urho's Tay.

And then, and then, and then...then there is the Urho carol which is tragic at best....

Urho Boy

(To the tune of Jingle Bells)

Dashing 'cross the yard
With a pitchfork in one hand,
Urho sees his foe
Munching all his land.

Grapes both green and red
Falling from the vine,
Urho has to get those hoppers
Or there will be no wine.

Oh, Urho boy, Urho boy,
The bravest that we've seen
Use the sisu that you've got
To get those bugs of green.

Hey!

Urho boy, Urho boy,
Our future's in your hands.
Stop those hoppers in their tracks
And save our mother land!

So, no, St. Urho's isn't Finnish, not in the least, but drinking holidays are always welcome around here so in that respect it might be adopted someday. And, for those Americans with their pictures taken in front of St. Urho's pub, I regret to inform you that it was named for Kekkonen. :)

Happy St. Patrick's Day :)

permalink Ω 17 March 2005, Helsinki

Wishful Thinking

« Snowclean™. Apply as needed! I have no idea what was in the barrel, but the name is great. »

I finally managed to get my permanent residence permit on Friday and was impressed that this year it only took 5 months instead of 7 or 8. Making the trip up to Malmi is one of the most depressing experiences an expat here can have. Once you get off the train and wander through the shopping mall of sorts and walk over to the police station, you enter a queue that is guaranteed to take three times longer than your least optimistic estimate. While you wait, it's impossible to really read a book since the Somali's tend to bring all of their children with them who either run around or, in the case of infants, cry for food, as well as the sweaty anxiousness of the place tends to lend little ease to even those who are just there to pick up their papers. The desperation and fear is impossible to avoid and makes it difficult to ignore all of your instincts that are telling you to make a break for it and run like hell. I overheard some loud American guy getting fussy over the long wait for his new visa after changing status and I kept waiting for his reaction to the new rule of four years residence instead of the previous two before being granted the permanent visa which he will likely be subject to since a change in status resets the clock. I'm delighted that my next trip to Malmi will be years from now.

On the topic of furriners and the welcome wagon [not] we receive at all points on the paperwork grid, Presso has an interesting article on how 1 in 4 Finns will be retired soon and, given the current birth rate, taxation rate, working population, and 1/3 of the population being openly racist/xenophobic that something is going to have to give. I will freely admit that had I not married a Finn, I'd be in the Caribbean somewhere enjoying warm days and shiny happy people. I enjoy Finland quite much, but it was nowhere on my radar of places I'd like to relocate. I doubt very much that Finland is going to attract the hoardes of white, well educated, working age people to prop up the retirement system that appears to be the current fantasy solution. Those sorts of people have many choices and many choices with less of a language barrier, a more hospitable climate and more welcoming to outsiders. Finland is far, far from the path of least resistance, even for the desperate. Considering I had a cake walk getting my papers compared to most foreigners, there are layers and layers of complexity that Finland doesn't have time to change before fiscal realities start to weigh in. My guess is that retirement age will be pushed higher or benefits lowered since having only 2 people working per retiree is a tax burden noone would abide. I do hope the government gets realistic, forgets the whole foreigner importation business and starts thinking realistically about what will likely be a very serious problem and, really, is one already.

Otava has been sick this weekend with diarrhea and vomiting. We took him up to the vet since he had all the symptoms of parvo though he has had all of his immunizations. The vet confirmed that the symptoms are not a result of a viral infection so I suspect that it's a reaction to the anti-inflammatory they prescribed last week for his leg. He's finally better today so we're relieved after worrying all day yesterday that something was very wrong. The leg is still a bit gimpy so we're likely going to have an x-ray done of the leg in a week or three since we want to be sure it's nothing serious and that it will heal in time. I can say that having a 40kg puppy who is teething and not being allowed to go play with his puppy pals for a week or more can be very trying on the patience. He is, however, too adorable and sweet to be cross with for very long. I spent a while shopping for books on Amazon while he slept next to me yesterday...

• Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn ∞ An entire book about one woman's lawn. Just when I thought I'd seen everything.
• Do You Speak American?" ∞ The history and development of the American English dialect.
• A Natural History of Latin ∞ Not very useful in Finland, but still looks interesting.
• Souvenir of Canada 2 ∞ Doug Coupland's continuing off-beat Canadian guide books.
• Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon
• The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World ∞ I've noticed quite a few new books suddenly being released on the Voynich which, I assume, is a direct result of the popularity of the Da Vinci Code.
• Best American Side Dishes (Best Recipe) ∞ Looks too good to pass up.
• Say What?: Talk Like A Local Without Putting Your Foot in It ∞ This could be entertaining or it could suck horribly but for the price it's not too much of a risk.
• City Walks London: 50 Adventures On Foot (City Walks) ∞ These are really well done and I hope there is enough interest that they publish more cities in the series.
• Trawler ∞ I wasn't very interested in this until I saw the author interviewed on The Daily Show recently and if the book is only half as interesting as he is it's sure to be a good read.
• The Weekend Baker: Irresistible Recipes, Simple Techniques, and Stress Free Strategies for Busy People ∞ Organizing a recipe book by how much time the recipe requires is a terrific idea.
• Quick Loaves: 150 Breads and Cakes, Meat and Meatless Loaves ∞ I must be hungry with all these cookbooks looking so good.
• The Geographer's Library ∞ A novel of literary intrigue, a genre made very popular by, again, The Da Vinci Code [which I haven't read] but this one sounds less of a shameless clone.
• New York Pop-up Postcards ∞ Cleverly done postcards.
• In Other Words ∞ Exploring the world of untranslatable expressions.
• The Revenge of Anguished English: More Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language ∞ The agony and the ecstasy of the English language in modern usage.
• Mediated: The Hidden Effects of Media on People, Places, and Things ∞ I saw this reviewed on Salon and found the author's feelings about media, consumption and narcissism to be very similar to my own.
• On Bullshit ∞ Backordered. A rant on bullshit is sounds refreshingly different.
• Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World ∞ Ambitious, but possibly cohesive enough to be worthwhile.
• Type: The Secret History of Letters ∞ Where would we be without type?
• St Petersburg (Everyman CityMap Guides S.) ∞ These little map guides are amazingly compact and useful. I have one for Stockholm which is perfect for getting around without carrying some 400+ page guide which you won't read anyway. I wish they had a larger selection of cities in the series.

permalink Ω 13 March 2005, Helsinki

Lethal Lunch

« A pair of snowmen in the park. Is it just me or did there seem to be a lot fewer snowmen around town this year? »

There is one detail in the structure of the Finnish workday that remains a bit strange; lunch. In the US, few workplaces have a cafeteria and most folks either eat at their desk or drive to the nearest Taco Hell and make a run for the border in their car. Lunch is an unceremonious affair if people take a lunch at all. I spent years either working instead of lunch or eating a sandwich at my desk somewhere around 2pm. Here, lunchtime is 11am and it seems, with rare exception, that everyone heads to the cafeteria and has a hearty, hot lunch. I presume that since few people have cars that driving off the rez for eatz just isn't possible, so a large majority just eat in. Lunch still feels like a guilty pleasure even though I've grown used to the 11am schedule, but the food....well, no.

My weight hadn't changed by more than a kilogram or two in 10 years until I started eating lunch at the cafeteria at work and I'm starting to suspect that the Finnish lunch is, in fact, deadly. Actually, I don't think my diet has really changed at all, except for the work cafeteria food, for the past 3 months so it must be responsible for my expanding landscape. I had heard rumous about the Finnish cafeteria food, but the scathing reviews didn't come close to the reality. It's not an all-you-can-eat buffet and I'm not snarfing heaping globs of the grey, unidentified goo that the cook feels compelled to stand next to and reassure the diners that it really is edible and does taste good in spite of the colour. The cook also seems to love curry for those days where the leftovers are 'repurposed' by putting them into a bright yellow curry goo and served with rice. When the entree isn't grey or curry yellow, it's brown. Rice, pasta and au gratin potatoes of some variety are a fixture. It's all the food that the videos in health class warned you not to eat. I keep imagining that we'll watch someone keel over from a massive heart attack in the middle of a mound of pyttipannu topped with 2 or 3 fried eggs. You know it's a bad day when most tables have salt, pepper and/or HP sauce being passed around as they did today. I never take the dessert, often a vat of an unknown gloop, since I generally prefer a dessert with texture even if the stuff happens to taste good. And water is the only beverage since Finnish cafeterias haven't been bought by the soft drink conglomerates which leaves a variety of milk products and a slightly alcoholic beer called kotikalja that, even at 1% ABV, I just can't bring myself to drink during working hours. Perhaps Martha Stewart's next book could be on mess hall/cafeteria/prison cooking in an attempt to help prisoners everywhere get a decent meal. We can only hope.

I really must stop eating lunch in the cafeteria every day and start riding my bike to work again soon instead of sitting on the bus so that I'll hopefully be able to avoid what really terrifies me most: shopping for new clothes. In Finland.

permalink Ω 7 March 2005, Helsinki

Sweaty. Naked. Drunk.

« One of the less animated creatures at the zoo. »

Sitting the bus yesterday morning, I was trying to get 10 more minutes of sleep before work when the bus came to a stop and I could hear the driver's radio playing Sade's Your Love is King which then segued into a Boy George song. It's strange how music from the early 80s, when I was in university, remains so vivid and how it evokes not just the memory of what I was doing back then, but the feeling as well. I had a terrifying rush of nostalgia and that heady feeling of a life filled with possibilities ahead of me. And then grim reality crushed the reverie and I realised I was on a noisy bus in the middle of cold, dark winter in a strange country heading to work at an hour well before I would have ever gone to classes and thought that not even in my most hallucinogenic moments would I have ever imagined that I would find myself here. Life is always full of unexpected surprises.

Penkkarit was yesterday and had I not been feeling so tired and crappy from the flu I would have gone down to Kaivopuisto with a 12-pack of Karhu and my camera and taken photos of the kids having a great time. My colleagues at work wondered if I would actually be able to get a ride on one of the trucks, but with a bunch of beer I'd probably have my choice of trucks to hitch a ride on. Next year. :)

We also had a 'drink all the booze so we don't have to move it to the new building' party yesterday evening in an underground entertainment suite at the office which closely resembled a very well equipped Finnish apocalyptic bunker - lots of beer, sauna and disco. I contemplated the option of going to the sauna with my female colleagues, as it was part of the festivities, but I thought that if getting totally drunk with coworkers is best avoided [something I've learned the hard way a few times :)], then getting drunk and naked is totally off the charts. Of course, getting blasted, naked and sweaty with colleagues is a cherished tradition in Finland. It may be a few years before I acculturate that particular bit.

Deep thought for the day - if corporations can outsource labour then why not outsource meetings as well? And buddhabrot is one of the coolest mandelbrot applications ever.

permalink Ω 18 February 2005, Helsinki

My Little Pukki

« Meet the pre-1900s model of the Nuuttipukki. The post-1900s model is not nearly as entertaining or colourful. »

For as long as I've been in Finland, I've been confused by the different 'pukkis' around the Christmas holidays. I think I'm pretty set on the whole idea of the Joulupukki, a.k.a. St. Nick, being associated with the guy in the red suit who lives in Rovaniemi. There are two others, olkipukki and nuuttipukki, that have been quite confusing since most Finns I've asked about them seem to know little about these traditions that have more or less faded from Helsinki, if not much of Finland. I find this a bit odd since most Finns I know seems to have more knowledge about American pop culture than I do yet when I bring up their own traditions in a country the size of New Mexico with a population about the same size as the Boston metropolitan area, they draw a blank. Of course, this could be a sign of how a lot of the old traditions are disappearing as the younger people don't learn about them or practise them anymore.

The olkipukki is a goat which used to be a pagan symbol of fertility which was, predictably, co-opted by the Christians in Medieval times and made into a devil who accompanied St. Nick at Christmas time. Later the goat would be softened into the gift bearing Christmas goat. Much, much later, Coca-cola would replace the stinky, fertile goat with a jolly red fat guy accompanied by a sleigh and 8 reindeer. Personally, I think I like the idea of the fertility goat better since there is now no mascot for the traditional Christmas shag and the children born 9 months later. You can make your own olkipukki in preparation for next year but mind that it mentions that cats seem rather fond of biting the finished product.

The nuuttipukki is even more obscure than the olkipukki as tomorrow is Nuutin päivä, but it's likely few people under 30 would remember it. :) Who couldn't love a day where you can dress up like an evil furry beast and trick-or-treat for booze and leftover ham?! I could really get into that sort of thing but it turned into a lame holiday that lost the spirit of the original and thus has faded from the holiday calendar. It's a pity, really. Perhaps it could be reincarnated as a pub night where you go demand beer from your local bartender in exchange for a few euros.

Nuutin Päivä

The following explanation of Nuutin päivä was summarized by Jarkko from Arno Forsius' page Nuutin päivä.

The "nuutti" comes from two Danish beautified kings named "Knut" (you would know one of them as the Canute with the poor command of the sea), both Nordic catholic saints. (Yes, even though the Catholic church was thrown out, the holy days survived, witness "juhannus" for St. John's day.)

The date was originally 7.1, being the day after Epiphany, seen as the end of the Yule carnival. One of the Knuts was killed on that date. Later in early 1700s the date was moved to the 13.1 because of some holy day shuffling. Which date was used depended on the region; some people kept using the "vanha nuutti", while some people started using the "uusi nuutti". In some places the festivities took two consecutive evenings: 7/8th or the 13/14th.

What happened on that day was that young men (mostly, sometimes also young women) dressed up as "nuuttipukkis" by wearing their fur coat inside out, old clothes, maybe wearing a mask or scarf of some sort or blackened face, often wearing straw sheafs or horns.

The groups of people went from house to house and loudly demanded the remainders of the Christmastime food and drink (especially the latter, beer and ale were popular draughts). If the people of the house did not cooperate, they were mocked with song and off-color jokes.

Sometimes the loot was consumed right there, sometimes collected to some large communal house (many villages had such a house for weddings and other large parties), and then consumed there.

In Finland the tradition survived the longest in the west and the south. In the beginning of 1900s the tradition became solely practiced by children instead of the teens or young adults, and instead of demanding beer they asked for candy and other treats, quite possibly affected by the Eastertime tradition of "little witches" that arrived from Karelia and eastern Finland.

permalink Ω 12 January 2005, Helsinki

Ten Years and Fifteen Bucks

« Pigs are pigs all the world over. »

Happy 40th Conrad and 30-*mumble* JJ! I think we have all earned the joy of good single malts and reading pandering crap like this knowing we're too old for the target market. James Earl Jones might have been cool, but RMS? Paging Brad Kuhn, paging Brad Kuhn....:) 'Tis a pity I gave up such ancient technology as the answering machine years ago.

When I came home tonight there was a big package from my mother who sent a few gifts, a few bags of dried cranberries and load of mail from the last few months which mostly consisted of quarterly retirement fund reports noting how much money they've lost this quarter and a slew of credit card offers. In contrast, the banks in Finland will mostly tell you to piss off if you want a MasterCard unless you have a job, even with a decent amount of money in the bank and no debt, and will give you a low line of credit and make you pay an annual fee. Of course, there's nowhere near the problem of personal debt here either.

After chopping up most of those I found an envelope from the City of St. Louis which struck me as odd since I've not lived there in almost a decade. I opened it and much to my amazement I found a harsh letter for a 10 year-old $15 parking ticket. Yes, TEN YEARS. Jesus christ in a merry widow with a cat 'o nines, even criminals enjoy a shorter statute of limitations on far worse crimes than being busted by the meter nazis. Fifteen whole dollars, which is something like 5 euro these days, induced them to send a threatening letter of doom.

Our records indicate that parking tickets issued to a vehicle registered in your name are delinquent. Your failure to satisfy this matter immediately will result in the forwarding of this debt to a national collection agency and may result in additional collection fees equal to 20 percent of the amount due. [emphasis theirs]

Holy shit, I'm in for a whole $15 and the $3 for collection. I'll bet Trump never got a lame letter like this when he was in the hole for a few billion bucks and I'm getting busted for a lousy $15?! The only thing worse than the US Postmaster on your ass is the parking ticket collective, even the parking nazis in Helsinki have an Orwellian logo to remind you that there is no escape from the everseeing eye of the "Time Expired" vultures. Why can't they just send me a letter that says something like that they're sorry that it took them 10 years to notice that I have one whole parking ticket outstanding and that they'd like me to pay up instead of the dramatic language of doom? I doubt that Finland would extradite me for a parking ticket back home, but I wonder if the US Customs guys would bust me if I ever reenter the US and send me to Gitmo as a parking terrorista. Who knew living on the edge could be so easy and so dreadfully dull at the same time?

Speaking of pigs, I found out about kinkkubingo [ham bingo] today at work. Bingo makes me think of old ladies [sorry mom] in church basements obsessing on their cards to win pocket money. Ham bingo is, apparently, a Christmas tradition of bingo or a raffle for a Christmas ham. I say 'apparently' as Google doesn't turn up much and my close Finnish girlfriend upon whom I rely to keep me informed on such important bits of cultural ephemera had never heard of it. DTM has a Kalkunnabingo [turkey bingo] every Sunday with Miss Bitch but, being a former fag hag supreme, I get a little suspicious when gay clubs start raffling off meat. :) It sounds like a bit of harmless holiday fun and might even be combined with a drinking game for pikkujoulu entertainment.

And, just in time for Christmas tree trimming, the paper lomo that you can cut out, glue together and enjoy. The Lomo people also have a cute advent calendar, too. Maybe I'll send one of the paper lomos to the parking crusaders with the pysäköinninvalvonta eyeball glued onto the front of it for grins.

permalink Ω 16 December 2004, Helsinki

Some things are too hard to describe

« M.A. Numminen. Imagine Tom Waits if he had done beat poetry, children's songs, looked vaguely like Colonel Sanders and spoke Finnish. »

We celebrated the Finnish Independence Day on Monday by going to a concert with friends. Neither they nor Jarkko could find the words to explain M.A. Numminen and, frankly, the description above is about as close as I can come to the truth. :) Any guy who can sing a song called "Talvisota [Winter War] Rock" with lyrics like "Go, Stalin, Go!" has a sense of irreverent humour I can enjoy. If only he would have had a smoke in one hand and a whisky in the other it would have completed the image. The performance was terrific and his band really knew how to swing, too. The second act was Matti Servo who I can try to describe as The Beach Boys get a Wurlitzer and go Las Vegas Lounge...in Finnish. :) It was a real Finnish cultural experience. I felt like a freak at work though when I mentioned how much fun I had at the show and either got a blank stare or a half-joking description of Numminen sounding like a rooster. Most great cultural icons and even not so great ones tend to generate strong like or dislike, don't they? :)

I also have to admit that I went to see the new Bridget Jones movie over the weekend and enjoyed it. :) The movie was a lot better than the book and Renée Zellweger really brings Bridget to life. I see so much of my own life in hers; the dinners with the smug marrieds when I was single, the talent for always saying too much or the wrong thing, feeling slightly pudgy, and otherwise feeling like an idiot or a 3-headed alien most of the time. Of course, there were two hours in which to enjoy Colin Firth who I wish someday would get a role that would really challenge his acting skill as well as light up the screen with a smile now and then.

permalink Ω 8 December 2004, Helsinki

Pyhäinpäivä and Varpajaiset

« A panoramic photo of candles lighting up pyhäinpäivä in Hietaniemi Cemetery. Click on the photo for a larger version. »

There are few things quite so moving as an entire cemetery glowing in a sea of candles, each placed on the graves by someone who cared enough to visit and remember the departed. Jarkko dutifully carried the tripod as we wandered through the cemetery for 2 hours after lighting a candle for HB. I took the Leica as well as a Russian pano camera I've had for a while but hadn't tried using yet. The pano camera has only 6 shutter speeds and, at 1/4 of a second, sounds like a dying alarm clock buzzer. When I was killing off the end of the rolls of film this afternoon so that I could develop them this evening, I noticed that the Leica wasn't spooling so I took it into the darkroom and opened it up and, sure enough, it hadn't been feeding the film. The M7 is a bit tricky since the film chamber is tighter than the M6 and you have to be diligent in shoving the film canister all the way down and get the film into the prongs properly. I was in a hurry on pyhäinpäivä and didn't check it before heading out. I know this happens to the pros on occasion so I don't feel too much like a tard, but I'm disappointed at the loss of some nice photos from the evening amidst the glow.

Congratulations to Ulla and Richard on their new, yet unnamed, baby boy who was born on Friday morning. :) There are so many new cultural tidbits you find out when friends have babies. Apparently Finland requires, by law, that the child be given a Finnish name so they're going to select a name that is easy for the British side of the family to pronounce, which rules out any names with r, ä, ö, double letters and vowels that look the same but don't sound the same as in English. I can't wait to find out what name meets the linguistic hurdles when the baby is named in a week or so. We helped Richard get drunk last night and barely made it through this evening for his varpajaiset. Varpajaiset is where the new father and his male friends, if they're sober enough, count the babies toes to make sure there are 10 of them, then proceed to smoke cigars and get drunk. The word, varpajaiset, literally translates to 'toeings' and we were speculating over beers and giggles that the counting was either for how many shots of kossu the father would have to drink or, because of the small gene pool in Finland, that it was just to check that you didn't accidentally marry your first cousin by mistake. Do they get to drink an extra shot if there are 11 toes? I'd love to know where this tradition came from since the doctors are usually the ones who are responsible for making sure the baby doesn't have 2 heads and 15 toes before and after they've left the womb and they're usually sober. :)

n.b. - I stand corrected on the name being Finnish requirement. I tried to trust parents on these things so...Jarkko read the text of the law and, while vague leaving possible room for such interpretaion, doesn't require a Finnish name. The Finnish Population Registry shows that while Finnish names remain the most popular, there are definitely some kids with names that will get them viciously taunted for the rest of their lives proving that parents are cruel everywhere. :)

• Yoda - 2
• Leia - 24
• Anakin - 4
• Lancelot - 8
• Gawain - 1
• Elvis - 112
• Frodo - 4
• Aragorn - 1
• Gandalf - 5, 1 of whom is female. Sadly, no Saurons.
• Arwen - 10
• Galadriel - 7
• Bilbo - 1
• Eowyn - 1
• Engelbert - 709
• Quentin - 10
• Egon - 140
• Donald - 205, low considering the Aku Ankka craze.
• Neo - 27
• Trinity - 2
• Moon - 7
• Foo - 2, way back before 1979. Curious.
• Tintin - 4, all women
• Atari - 1
• Linux - 1, poor kid. He's probably a luddite.
• Perl - 1, around 1900.
• Ruby - 42
• Buster - 12

Hours of free entertainment to be had digging in the archives for cruel and unusual names. :)

permalink Ω 14 November 2004, Helsinki

Polar Huns

« A figure carved into a door in Tallinn. What happened to his right arm? »

This week's Ask the Pilot features a short bit about Finland that is funny if a bit stereotypically unenlightened. The Finn singing Blister in the Sun is likely lucky he lived to see another flight.

First, what's the deal with Finland? My column seems to be inordinately popular there, for reasons I can't explain. Asking around, I'm told the Finns are among the planet's most Internet savvy populations, but still, five letters in less than a week? Certain places I take for granted. I receive semi-frequent mail from Australia, as an example. The Aussies speak English and have a rich aviation history. Finland I'm not so sure of.

What few things I know about Finland don't explain the mystery. For instance, I know the Finns hate being called Scandinavian. That's because they're not. The Finnish language, unlike Swedish or Norwegian or Danish, branches from the same family of tongues -- Finno-Ugrian -- that claims Hungarian.

Thus you can think of the Finns, maybe, as an alienated, dislocated community of Polar Huns. I'm also told the summertime mosquitoes in Lapland are the world's most voracious.

Possibly for these reasons, enormous groups of young Finns routinely flee their homeland. At least for the weekend. They proceed via ferry, across the gulf from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, where they spend the next three days gorging on cheap Russian liquor. Then, in what must be a truly grotesque scene of en-masse hangover and seasickness, they catch the ferry home again. St. Petersburg as a sort of Baltic Cancun.

Maybe things have changed, but that's how it was in February 1986, when I spent five days in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was still called) at the Pribaltiskaya Hotel. What the Pribaltiskaya lacked in luxuries it made up for with a well-stocked bar and a tolerance for obnoxious revelry. The boat from Helsinki arrived on Friday afternoon, and by 8 p.m. hundreds of Finns were collapsed into unconscious pig-piles in the stairwells, elevators and hallways. Piles of drunken bodies were giving off fumes like gasoline-soaked firewood. Those still ambulatory were climbing the flagpoles and jumping head-first into the laundry chutes.

All right, in fairness I'll add that groups of partying Swedish kids were up to much the same thing. I quickly lost track of which drunken posses were the Finns and which were the Swedes.

The Swedes, it turns out, became easier to spot because many of them were weeping. Only hours earlier, Sweden's beloved prime minister, Olof Palme, had been assassinated in Stockholm. As details of the killing trickled in, distraught teenagers huddled around each other in the hotel restaurant, downing bottle after bottle of $3 champagne; pouring vodka onto the tables and slapping the puddles with their hands.

Finnair, to politely change the subject, is Finland's national airline. Founded in 1923, it operates a 60-strong fleet as far as Bangkok, Shanghai and Hong Kong. In fact it was Finnair that flew me from New York to Russia back in '86, by way of Helsinki. The airline has a good reputation and is popular for its routes to Eastern Europe. Then again, it also calls itself "the official airline of Santa Claus" and is known for cramming 10-abreast seating into its MD-11s instead of the standard nine.

In '86 it was an old DC-10, predecessor of the MD-11, and it too had the 10-abreast squeeze. Then we suffered a flat tire during a fuel stop in Montreal.

Even more disturbing than the three-hour delay and deep vein thrombosis, however, was the whacked-out man sitting behind me. This young, disheveled, and very inebriated Finn insisted on singing, full voice, all the way across the Atlantic.

First it was Grace Jones, whose songs are intolerable in any form, let alone in a Finno-Ugrian accent at 2 in the morning. This was followed by the entire Violent Femmes first album, a heretofore terrific record that I could never again listen to without shuddering, thanks to the demented Finn's drooling renditions of "Blister in the Sun" and "Please Do Not Go."

On the return I spent a snowy afternoon in Helsinki, where the highlight was finding a pizza place. Finland is known for pizza about as much as it's known for coconuts, but nothing tasted better after a week and a half of Soviet food.

And, never, ever, tempt fate by asking what more could go wrong in your wretched little life as my back is now out again for the second time in 2 years. There are few things that make you feel quite so helpless as lying in bed and being either completely unable to move or being able to move but only with an acute pain that I fail to describe adequately. It does give you a new appreciation for a body part that we take for granted. On the upside, the drugs leftover from the last time this happened are actually some really good shit. :) Better living made possible by DuPont.

permalink Ω 15 October 2004, Helsinki

Herring Festival

« A herring salesman with fur hat and a few other photos from the herring festival. »

Everything I know about Baltic herring, which is very little, I learned in Finland. The Helsinki Baltic Herring Fair [a live webcam shows the market as well] has herring in just about every form imaginable and even some that aren't. Herrings apparently communicate with each other by farting [the url for the wav is wrong in the article and you'll find it here.]. Farts are pretty sonar-riffic so I suppose this shouldn't be very exciting.

I'm still not that keen on the fishy taste of herring, no matter how sexed up in some sort of sauce they are, but they're impossible to avoid here so I'm working hard to like the little buggers. Given the choice between eating herring or spending the day at Malmi like I did today, I'd eat the herring so they can't be all that bad. :)

permalink Ω 6 October 2004, Helsinki

Death by Mushroom

« Mushrooms that resemble the Lauttasaari water tower. »

Finland has a thing for mushrooms because, I suppose, they grow pretty well here and they are plentiful this time of year. The first time I visited Helsinki, I fell in love with the Lauttasaari water tower because I thought it looked like an alien space ship or mushroom that had an eerie blue glow at night. The water towers in Finland frequently resemble mushrooms or other fanciful shapes, but the Lauttasaari space mushroom remains my favourite.

On one of the first grocery shopping trips I noted a wide array of mushrooms in the produce section and Jarkko pointed out the false morels that he said were deadly unless cooked properly [I will add here that there is a marvelous Nordic and Russian languages food glossary as well as a very beautifully done Finnish/Russian collection of recipes on the same website]. This, of course, was noted next to the harmless looking fungi, but only in Finnish. I suppose that I was shocked to think that anything in the grocery might actually be deadly, especially for some city kid like me who wouldn't know my ass from a poisonous mushroom if let into the woods on my own. My German mother loved to drag us out into the woods to hunt for morels as well as for blackberries to make into jams. The only problem with this was that if you didn't put at least 3 rubberbands/elastics around your sleeves and pant legs and wear gloves on your hands and plastic bags over your socks, you'd be in agony for a week or more due to the dreaded fuckingus chiggerius. These guys are invisible and invite 5000 of their closest friends to dine on your digested flesh, they make mosquitos look good. My choice whether to forage in the woods with the flesh eaters vs. shopping in the grocery in later years was pretty easy.

I also immediately thought of the liability insurance and lawsuits in the US arising from all the deaths of people who couldn't be bothered to read the warning signs next to them. Perhaps this is passive Darwinism in Finland at work since kids here are trained in the art of identifying mushrooms and berries, even the Latin taxonomic names, from birth so the unsuspecting foreigners who go to the shop and think they look yummy and eat them raw, get removed from the gene pool. I wonder how many cases of death by toxic mushroom happen every year. The woolly milkcap above, a.k.a. Lactarius torminosus, is toxic if not parboiled before eating. I have to admit that its peach colour with furry texture wouldn't lead me to pick it and eat it without the onset of starvation. I think I'll stick with shopping in the grocery and eating only those things that I recognize and am sure won't kill me. :)

The Baltic herring market [note to port of helsinki webmaster: 20 lines of plaintext in a .doc format is really aggravating.] is coming soon so we should all prepare for the herring breath and seagulls. A friend who lives in LA composed a lovely poem one night on IRC about herring that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Burning Herring by Conrad

My herring burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But oh my friends
But oh my friends
It is a fucking FISH on FIRE!

I've decided to work with B&W film a bit more since I actually prefer it to colour film but the cost of developing it is mysteriously double the cost of developing other films. So, I'm going to start developing the film myself and use my cheap negative scanner for displaying them on the net. The equipment needed is actually pretty simple and the instructions from Ilford make it seem very hard to fuck up. I've always wanted to try developing film so why not? Hey, I'm a chemist, I should be able to manage this...I think. If anyone knows of the secret place where one can get development equipment and chemicals, aside from fotoyks, in a one-stop kind of shopping orgy, I'd be much obliged for any information leading to the stinking-up of our sauna-soon-to-be-darkroom.

Addendum: I was thinking why the varmints are called chiggers and went to look it up in the Dictionary of American Regional English and thought I'd share. :)

chigger n Pronc-spp cheeger, chego chigo(e), chigre, chigroe [Alter of Cariban chigoe] CFjigger Note: since both chigger and jigger are used of two similar tiny parasites, a mite (sense 1 below) which is widely distributed in the US, and a flea (sense 2 below) found chiefly in the South, there is overlapping both of the creatures' occucrrence and of the names, with some popular confusion.

1 A harvest mite (Trombicula spp.) Also called jigger,redbug

2 also chigoe flea: A flea (Tunga penetrans) that burrows into the skin. Also called jigger.

The first citation is from 1851 but I'm pretty sure the native Americans had a few choice words for them as well. It's interesting to note that the false belief that it 'burrows into the skin' remains even in the recent DARE definition.

permalink Ω 23 September 2004, Helsinki

What the trees know

« A rowan tree, heavily laden with fruit foretelling a harsh winter. »

Talking about the weather and weather folklore has to be one of the few universal traits that transcends race and culture. Everybody has some goofy 'old wives tale' about a wolly worm with a full furry coat signals a harsh winter. This year, the rowan trees in Finland are practically bending to the ground they are so full of fruit which I am told is part of the Finnish weather folklore and warns people of a harsh winter approaching. I don't know that I believe it, but with the geese migrating early and the generally crappy weather we've had all summer long, I'm starting to wonder what nature knows that we don't.

Back home, we've got lots of weather sayings and wives tales, and some of them are pretty funny. I haven't found anything with a collection of Finnish weather folklore, but I'm guessing that it isn't terribly different. You have to wonder where some of these stories came from and why people still either believe them or mention them aside from their entertainment value.

Weather Folklore

• Horses run fast before a violent storm or before windy conditions.
• Pigs gather leaves and straw before a storm.
• Flowers close up before a storm.
• If the bull leads the cows to pasture, expect rain; if the cows precede the bull, the weather will be uncertain.
• Expect rain and maybe severe weather when dogs eat grass.
• Wolves always howl more before a storm.
• When the rooster goes crowing to bed, he will rise with a watery head.
• Ants are busy, gnats bite, crickets sing louder then usual, spiders come down from their webs, and flies gather in houses just before rain and possible severe storms.
• Evening red and morning gray are sure signs of a fine day.
• Evening gray and morning red, put on your hat or you'll wet your head.
• When small clouds join and thicken, expect rain.
• Dandelion blossoms close before a storm.
• If autumn leaves are slow to fall, prepare for a cold winter..
• When the leaves of trees turn over, it foretells windy conditions and possible severe weather.
• Redbirds or Bluebirds chatter when it's going to rain.
• Birds on a telephone wire indicate the coming of rain.
• Before a storm, cows will lie down and refuse to go out to pasture.
• When spiders weave their webs by Noon, fine weather is coming soon.
• If wasps build their nests high, the winter will be long and harsh.
• When it is evening you say, "It will be fair, for the sky is red." In the morning, "It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening." Matthew 16:2
• It will be a cold, snowy winter if:
  -Squirrels accumulate huge stores of nuts.
  -Beavers build heavier lodges than usual.
  -Hair on bears and horses is thick early in season.
  -the breastbone of a fresh-Cooked turkey is dark purple.
• A severe summer denotes a windy autumn; a windy winter a rainy spring; a rainy spring a severe summer; a severe summer a windy autumn; a month that comes in good, goes out bad.
• The sky turns green in a storm when there is hail.
• A veering wind will clear the sky, a backing wind says storms are nigh.
• When you look out your window and see your Dogs jumping around and ducking Its a sign that its hailing.
• When dogs in your house start looking paranoid schizophrenic expect very heavy sleet for 5 hours.

permalink Ω 17 September 2004, Helsinki

The Day The Earth Froze

I've been watching the 1980s TV serial adaptation of the Kalevala, Rauta-aika [Iron Age], being shown in 4 parts on Tuesdays on YLE2. I've never really liked adaptations which may be due to having been forced to sit through a torturous production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing that was set on a tennis court and featured something I could only describe as valley girls with big hair and bubble gum. The actors were lucky we didn't start throwing things and booing. Rauta-aika isn't all that bad even though the actors speak prose and some of the costumes are pretty over the top. A few days ago I mentioned the show to Chip Salzenberg, the human movie quote database, who immediately asked, "The Day the Earth Froze?" No, the Kalevala, not some bad sci-fi flick. As it happens, Chip and Jeff Goff are MST3K devotees who provided me with the MST3K episode featuring the absurdly bad The Day the Earth Froze which, in spite of the misleading title, is a 1959 movie of the Kalevala.

The movie was titled Sampo everywhere else but the US without explanation as to who thought the B-movie sci-fi title would be a brilliant replacement. The US version is also about 30 minutes shorter although, judging by what wasn't cut, it likely was an act of mercy. The Ministry of Culture in the then USSR apparently funded and commissioned this entertainment bomb for some deeply mysterious reason. The US version changes many the Russian and Finnish names to sound, presumably, less like commies and the opening credits manage to misspell Lönnrot's name. The MST3K guys often mock the Swedish in the episode but I think the Finns wouldn't bother to correct them and let the Swedes take all the credit for this total suckfest. The English dubbing over the original Russian is spectacularly bad, too, as I guess no one bothered to ask how the Finnish words and names were pronounced and, after a while, I think they just started making shit up. One of the more hilarious moments of heckling is when Crow makes fun of the actress who plays Louhi by saying, "Marty Feldman in a role that won't surprise you!" :)

It was good for a laugh but it was like watching a Paris Hilton version of Walden Pond set in a luxury tourist resort where you begin to wonder if you haven't slipped into a parallel and alternate reality. It's a pity that no one has actually done a full movie production of the Kalevala or a film of the people who kept the stories alive before they were finally collected by Lönnrot and written down. I think even a low-budget "Blair Witch" style Kalevala movie would suck less than this movie does. I have a new appreciation for Rauta-aika now. :)

permalink Ω 13 September 2004, Helsinki

Stairway to Heaven

« A contestant at the Finnish air guitar finals in Helsinki before competing in the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu. [do watch the video as one of the winners is a pretty hot looking woman. :)] »

It has often been said that guitars and cars are phallic extensions and, at least with guitars, you can almost picture it as such but air guitar is like clothed public masturbation. :) It's more enjoyable than karaoke for the spectator, at least a sober one, and in the age of MTV who didn't want to play like Eddie Van Halen at one point or another? There was a bit of a judging scandal, too. What in the hell is it with sport scandals this year? If it's not doping or drugs it's a judging fiasco. It takes all the focus off the sport and puts it on the business side. At least no one jumped up on stage and tried to warn the contestants about the impending end of the world.

And, perl people should join me in a moment of silence for the valiant sparc formerly known as chaos.wustl.edu since it gave its last gasp on Friday and will be given to the boneyard for parts. Chaos had been in service for almost ten years and it took 3 years of hard beating when it served as the search.cpan.org host before it was rescued by an E450. I spent a lot of late nights and early morning keeping chaos running when it was getting pummeled and, I think, we bonded. I'm not a very sentimental person but I'm going to miss that poor old box. A special thanks to Alan Reuter and the whole CTS department at Washington University in St. Louis for hosting it for all these years. Chaos also hosted the cpan.org DNS which Ben Hockenhull has fixed for now until I work up the enthusiasm to work with NyetworkSolutions and move things around. So long chaos, I'll miss you. *sniff*

permalink Ω 31 August 2004, Helsinki

Burning Rubber

« The smell of burning rubber. »

Cruising Night was last Friday but it seems I didn't get the memo about them first collecting in the harbour area before meeting in the icehall parking lot soo...it was too dark to really take any photos after 10p when the cars finally started arriving there. I only bothered with a few shots of the cars burning rubber on the lot for spectators and those who love the smell of burning rubber. I was disappointed since I do love classic cars.

And, barring any loss of motivation, the Prague photos will be available by sometime tomorrow.

permalink Ω 13 August 2004, Helsinki

The Finn in 1926

« A 'typical office building' in 1926 at the corner of Lönnrotinkatu and Yrjönkatu. State office building, yes, but typical? It's still there today. »

It's always dangerous to pay a visit to the Hagelstamin Antikvaarinen Kirjakauppa [nice old used bookstore] because it's easy, too easy, to find something of interest. The lastest find is Finland To-day by Frank Fox printed in 1926. I've got a small collection of English travelogues and other writings about Finland but this is the earliest I've found so far. I can't find anything about the author from the non-existent colophon or from the net, but he was likely a post-Imperial Englishman who smoked a pipe and embraced all the things we commonly think of when we imagine such people. His preface is, however, rather amusing and says more about him than about his subject.

The Finns -- what is the key to an understanding of this race, with so much stubborn courage and yet so much cautious prudence; so fertile in imagination and yet with such a gift for methodical organization; so strong in race pride and yet able to come from out a long period of subjection to a foreign power with no painful record of revolts and martyrdoms?

I have sought that key by a visit to their country and by a study of their history and their art and literature, and can offer to my readers perhaps some clues, certainly not a clear explanation, of a people who remain still to me enigmatic. How can one explain a people who suggest at one time the Japanese, at another the Irish, at another the Scots, at another the Americans, at another the citizens of one of the little states of ancient Greece? Certainly they cannot be classified. They are their own genus.

It will be worth while for students of mankind to keep an eye on these Finns (not four millions in number if one leaves out of the count emigrants) who have already made a small mark in the world and who are destined to make a much greater mark. Fate has placed them athwart Russia, whose development from Bolshevism will give the chief interest to the future history of the twentieth century; and this outpost position will keep Finland prominent on the world's stage. By character they are eager to try out all those problems of post-war civilization which have to do with the reconciliation of democracy with authority, of capitalism with the rights of labour, of art with mechanical industry, of woman's claim to civic equality with the institution of the family. Both in issues of foreign politics and social polities, therefore, the world is likely to hear a great deal of Finland in the future.

But I wish to emphasize that this book does not pretend to offer more than a traveller's impressions of the Finns and Finland. Statements in it of historical or economic fact are, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. The rest -- criticisms, opinions, surmises-are those of an observer who does not speak the Finnish tongue and had to rely much upon interpreters and Finns who spoke English. Fortunately English is very generally spoken by educated Finns; with others, interpreters helped. To know what "the others"-i.e. the people of merely elementary education-thought was, to my mind, essential.

On which point, a memory from another land. I was seeking once to know what the Arabs in a Near East territory were thinking and saying on a certain subject. An excellent interpreter helped me to get the views of many notables-priests, merchants, officials, journalists. But he made a meek protest when I sought his aid to get bazaar gossip at first hand. It was in the days before Angora had made the wearing of a bowler hat a test of sound nationalism, and every good Moslem wore the fex. The fez, like the silk hat which used to be a badge of British respectability, needs frequent ironing to keep it shaped and comely. The little shops where the fez is ironed are the great gossip centres of the East. My interpreter objected to my plan of haunting these places whilst he translated to me what was said.

"These people are of no importance at all," he pleaded. "They will say nothing valuable."

Nevertheless we listened to the gossip, and there were good gleanings: valuable evidence to check and to explain the statement of more responsible people.

When I first read the paragraph insinuating that most educated Finns spoke English and 'the others' were merely less educated, I had to check the date of publication just to make sure it wasn't written far more recently. Outside of the major cities, even now, you can't expect people to speak English. Perhaps he just hung around at the British embassy having tea and cakes while chatting up the Finnish Anglophiles. At the time, Finland had only recently asserted its independence and, as far as I'm aware, the languages taught in schools were Finnish, Swedish and German with English replacing the German much later. The author's little anecdote about the fez is also pretty funny as it conjures the image of some stuffy old fart in a smoking jacket and fez reclining in his library lined with books and glassy-eyed taxidermy waxing poetic about that last safari he took 20 years prior. Overall, though, his observations about the people and the political stage at the time seem rather prescient.

If he was looking for gossip with the lowly little people of Finland who didn't speak English, he sure as hell wasn't eating with them judging by his description of Finnish food experienced under what he calls "natural conditions."

[breakfast] It begins with the usual "continental" breakfast of coffee and rolls (no alcoholic drink is taken with this!), which discovers some new and delightful forms of bread. There is knackerbrod, for instance, made of rye, unleavened I should say, and, when properly crisp, of delightful taste. There is clean strength in it, too, far more than in the starchy white bread of Britain and of France. One could live a week on knackerbrod and butter and do a hard day's work all the while.

Lunch comes fairly early in the day and is generally the principal meal. It offers a variety of about thirty different snacks and trifles, such as little potatoes, cooked in their jackets and served to be eaten whole with plenty of butter, pepper, and salt; omelette and egg dishes; cheese with knackerbrod; sardines, lake trout, and half a dozen other varieties of fish; caviare; reindeer tongue, hard and smoked; a kind of reindeer biltong; various other dried and preserved meats; and various salads of cooked or of raw vegetables-radishes, onions, celery, cabbage, cauliflower, etc. You choose about half a dozen of these "appetizers," consume them, and then try another half-dozen. A good Finnish appetite is able to encompass about twenty in all. Those who have lived in Russia will recognize that in this one particular at least, of making the little preliminaries the most important part of the midday meal, Finland follows Russian customs. There comes next one of a variety of set dishes-of meat, eggs, or of fish-and then coffee.

I've looked around a bit, but I've not found anything to support the idea that Finnish dining habits were of Russian fashion. The meal sounds like a typical buffet but, at the time, it likely was out of reach for most of the inhabitants of Finland given the post-WWI economy. It's funny how he whines a wee bit over no booze with breakfast since Finland was still enduring a brief and misguided bout of prohibitionism [he goes on at great length in the prohibition chapter on this topic where he descends into a non-sensical analogy of women's lust for draperies and lust for the demon drink]. But, considering I had a grandmother who boiled hamburger, the British were not a people in a position to critique the cuisine of other countries. :) The most fun comes when he tries to describe sauna to the British travelling class;

The tourist will be interested to sample the Finnish national bath. On this point a word of caution. In the capital and in the big towns the chief bath establishments are very good, but they follow the Swedish and not the Finnish mode. You are steamed in a cabinet, rubbed down by vigorous masseuses, put in a hot bath and rubbed down again; then have a cold douche bath. But a Finnish bath-house can be found on inquiry in every big centre, and in the country districts it is the only type of bath-house. Every villa